Www.economist. In which something old and powerful is encountered in a vault FINGERS stroke vellum; the calfskin pages are smooth, like paper, but richer, almost oily.
The black print is crisp, and every Latin sentence starts with a lush red letter. One of the book’s early owners has drawn a hand and index finger which points, like an arrow, to passages worth remembering. In 44BC Cicero, the Roman Republic’s great orator, wrote a book for his son Marcus called de Officiis (“On Duties”). It told him how to live a moral life, how to balance virtue with self-interest, how to have an impact. Officiis was read and studied throughout the rise of the Roman Empire and survived the subsequent fall. 14 Brilliant Pieces of Literature You Can Read in the Time it Takes to Eat Lunch. Memento Mori by Jonathan Nolan. This short story was the basis for the movie, Memento.
I added the part numbers because I found myself reading it incrementally; they are not part of the original story. The italics, type, emphases, and so on are original. This was copied from the Esquire feature on it, and is also available on the DVD version of Memento. I archived both here to avoid link-rot. "What like a bullet can undeceive! " Your wife always used to say you'd be late for your own funeral. Right about now you're probably wondering if you were late for hers.
You were there, you can be sure of that. The guy in the picture, the one with the flowers? The Madman. In the silent hour of the night, as I lay half asleep, my seven selves sat together and thus conversed in whispers: First Self: Here, in this madman, I have dwelt all these years, with naught to do but renew his pain by day and recreate his sorrow by night.
I can bear my fate no longer, and now I must rebel. Second Self: Yours is a better lot than mine, brother, for it is given me to be this madman's joyous self. I laugh his laughter and sing his happy hours, and with thrice winged feet I dance his brighter thoughts. It is I that would rebel against my weary existence. Short Story Prize: Morgan and Jeff's Divorce Party Invitation. How Chris McCandless Died. Twenty-one years ago this month, on September 6, 1992, the decomposed body of Christopher McCandless was discovered by moose hunters just outside the northern boundary of Denali National Park.
He had died inside a rusting bus that served as a makeshift shelter for trappers, dog mushers, and other backcountry visitors. Taped to the door was a note scrawled on a page torn from a novel by Nikolai Gogol: From a cryptic diary found among his possessions, it appeared that McCandless had been dead for nineteen days. A driver’s license issued eight months before he perished indicated that he was twenty-four years old and weighed a hundred and forty pounds.
Negative Reinforcement. By Chuck Palahniuk Printed in Modern Short Stories August 1990 Audrey is a sexual outlaw, slave to a Latin rhythm, a C-section child of the seventies.
She's a rabid panther trapped in the fetid, jungle heat of the Number 14, Bonnedale bus. And she's sitting right behind you for the third time this month. Winter's most beautiful secret: The astonishing, complex science of snowflakes. Outside it is cold, cold—ten degrees below, give or take.
I step out with my coat zipped up to my chin and my feet encased in heavy rubber boots. The glittering street is empty; the wool-gray sky is low. Under my scarf and gloves and thermals I can feel my pulse begin to make a racket. I do not care. I observe my breath. Quebec Writing Competition. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Tomato Can Blues. Short Stories. Neil Gaiman's The Price. Tramps and vagabonds have marks they make on gateposts and trees and doors, letting others of their kind know a little about the people who live at the houses and farms they pass on their travels.
I think cats must leave similar signs; how else to explain the cats who turn up at our door through the year, hungry and flea-ridden and abandoned? We take them in. We get rid of the fleas and the ticks, feed them and take them to the vet. We pay for them to get their shots, and, indignity upon indignity, we have them neutered or spayed. And they stay with us, for a few months, or for a year, or for ever. Rikki-tikki-tavi. At the hole where he went in Red-Eye called to Wrinkle-Skin.
Hear what little Red-Eye saith: ``Nag, come up and dance with death! '' Eye to eye and head to head, (Keep the measure, Nag.) This shall end when one is dead; (At thy pleasure, Nag.) The longest joke in the world. A man in the desert. So, there’s a man crawling through the desert.
He’d decided to try his SUV in a little bit of cross-country travel, had great fun zooming over the badlands and through the sand, got lost, hit a big rock, and then he couldn’t get it started again. There were no cell phone towers anywhere near, so his cell phone was useless. He had no family, his parents had died a few years before in an auto accident, and his few friends had no idea he was out here. Short stories at east of the web.
A game of Scrabble has serious consequences. - Length: 4 pages.
Small Beer Press. By Ray Vukcevich Sun 1 Jul 2001 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, Short Stories | 18 Comments And then she fired her parting shot. “And not only that,” she said, as if “that” hadn’t been quite enough, “you snore horribly!” “I do not,” I said. Never Date a Writer by xstephens. Never date a writer because she’ll fictionalize everything. She’ll write about things you have done to her, or things you never did for her.
She’ll write about how you never bought her flowers.